HST
296E: Rural Life in the United
StatesUniversity of VermontProf. Dona Brown

Donahue,
Brian, The
Great Meadow:
Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord. (New London: Yale
University Press, 2004.)

About the Book: On occasion, a
history book will be written that fundamentally changes how a topic
should be approached thereafter. This is one of
those
books. It makes us wonder how any study of early colonial settlers
could have left out the most fundamental aspect of
that life: the land they settled on. Beautifully written and
meticulously researched, the book traces the land around Concord as it
was settled and altered during the first hundred years of Anglo
occupation.

About the
illustrations:
Most of the photographs were taken by Herbert Gleason during the early
20th cent. Donahue chose them to show an environment that was closer to
original land use
patterns. He bases much of his research on GIS maps, some compiled from
records of the mid 17th
century.

Preface

Did excessive deforestation and extensive
farming by colonialists wear out the land to the point that, by 1850,
it could not
support the population? Donahue's intention is to answer that question
by looking at how the land was actually used.

Though there are no comprehensive records for the period before the tax
valuation of Concord was in 1749, which
recorded number of acres plowed and planted, number of livestock, and
amount of harvests he has been able to piece together information about
the how the land was
used by examining assessors' maps using GIS.

"My contention is that colonial agriculture in Concord was an
ecologically sustainable adaptation of English mixed husbandry to a
new, challenging environment." (p. xv) The object of early colonial
farmers was a comfortable subsistence that would be generationally
secure. It's practice relied on careful husbandry, a balance between
plowlands, orchard, meadow, pasture, woodland, and manure. It was not
exploitive in the sense that overproduction to extract a single
commodity was its goal. Rapid population growth and an increasingly
important market economy put pressure on this model.

Donahue explores how English husbandry was adapted to
Concord and how well it held up for five generations. He takes an
ecological approach, exploring the ecosystem through the use of maps.
It is not a comprehensive look at NE ecosystems in general, (for
example he does not examine the transformation of native flora
and fauna), rather a look at farming systems. He also does not examine
women's roles and activities. However, he brings his own experience
with mixed husbandry to bear. "Where we live, good plowland is often
poor for grass, and good
grassland is difficult to plow. I don't recall ever reading this
simple fact in a book about New England's agricultural history. . . It
is a thing you learn by watching the arable home field scorch in an
August drought, while those rockbound hillsides stay green." (p. xviii)

"I set out expecting to find that my forbears on this soil and in these
woods were primarily agents of the dominant tradition of market
exploitation, perhaps in spite of themselves. What I found instead--and
what I think is the most significant story I have to tell--is that here
we have an unusual interlude in American agrarian history in which the
tradition of sustainable husbandry was, for several generations at
least, more powerful than the extractive drive." (p. xix)

Chapter
1:
Introduction

Concord was the first inland settlement of the Massachusetts Bay
Colony. "This book is about what a few dozen square miles of land
surrounding
the Great Meadow were made of, how that land came to be the way it
was, and what the English husbandmen who arrived in 1635 made of it."
(p. 2)

The land is a result of glaciation. The Town and Bridge meadows lie on
top of a former glacier lake bed, thus the soil is easy to work, though
prone to wet. This combination grows coarse native hay, very good for
animals.

The earliest settlers came from the open-field tradition in England,
based on communal farming, including the fencing system to keep
animals out of crops. It involved dividing land according to its
usefulness. Portions would be owned by individuals but used communally.
(p. 7) Communal improvements were also made. The Great Meadow produced
good hay only when the river did not flood
excessively. Thus, early ecological transformations focused on
controlling flooding. (p. 8)

During the First Division of the land granted to the settlers, 1/4 of
30,000 acres was alloted, with the remainder left as Common land.
Homes were built clustered together in the village, with the workable
land surrounding that. In the next generation, the land was divided
again. This Second Division saw more
privatization of land. Normally, younger sons retained the village lot
and the father's holdings,
while older sons got consolidated 2nd division parcels.

Chapter
2:
Musketaquid: The Native Ecological System

The land which is now called Concord was periodically covered with ice
during the “ice ages” that Earth goes through due to its orbital tilt
and other variables such as carbon dioxide and ocean currents. During
this time, the land was molded by the ever advancing and retreating ice
– accompanied by water.

The last time the ice shelf retreated was some 13000 years ago, and we
currently live in on of the typically short inter-glacial periods
(10.000 years on average), the Holocene Epoch.

Soil makeup in Concord after the last retreat of the ice shelf. (Table
2.1. – page 27.)

As the ice had departed, the creation of the “real” soil started, as
scientists choose to label the soil that the glacier leaves behind
“parental material”. This “real” soil consists of all the biomaterial
that is packed upon the parental material and would include all living
organisms and vegetation. At first the developing soil would have been
labeled tundra as we now find in the Northern parts of Canada and
Russia, but soon other vegetation moved in from the south. Forest
returned to Concord some 12000 years ago, and from that time the flora
has changed continuously. Scientists can study this development through
fossil pollen grains, and as time passed, more hardwood species such as
elm, ash and maple migrated into the area. Important nut species such
as Hickory and Chestnut were slow to migrate – 5000 and 2000 years ago
respectively.

Humans made their way across the ice shelf connecting Asia and America,
and humans have been present in Concord during the last 10.000 years
(at least). Paleoindians probably arrived in strength just after 11000
years ago, and these people were hunter/gatherers. During their time, a
number of large game animals such as caribou, and mammoths were either
migrating somewhere else or going extinct and so the Paleoindian way of
life could not be sustained. However, human presence was lingering
after that, and other food sources such as shellfish, small game and
nuts became more important in the diet.

1000 years ago horticulture was adopted by natives in Southern New
England, which allowed for much greater populations compared to the
hunter/gatherers in Northern New England. These people called the place
that later became Concord, Musketaquid = Grass-ground River.

Donahue speculates whether these Musketaquid Indians used fire to
control their environment and older data even suggests that their
predecessors used fire to some extent. He also raises the question on
whether the Musketaquid way of life would have been sustainable if the
Europeans would not have arrived and answered that question for him.
Did they also degrade the land?

Chapter
3: Mixed
Husbandry: The English Ecological System

In 1635 English settlers arrive in Concord and introduce a new kind of
agriculture to the land – one that had developed over centuries in
England. Donahue calls this mixed husbandry as the English depended on
both livestock and arable farming. The largest part of these people
came from a pastoral area of England, while other prominent families
came from arable regions. “The story of Concord” for the next centuries
“revolves around the adaptation of that English heritage to a new
environment” (p. 54).

Mixed husbandry has some advantages over simple agrarian or pastoral
life. Livestock produces important sources of protein such as milk,
meat and other byproducts such as leather and wool. Livestock also
enabled the farmer to plow and cultivate harder and rockier lands,
where the hoe (that the Native Americans used primarily) would not do.
Furthermore, the livestock could cart heavy things around and provide
manure for fertilizing the cropland.

As English mixed husbandry started to reach the upper levels of its
sustainability during the late Middle Ages, the land used for growing
grass for the livestock came in shorter supply as more land was used
for cropping. “Meadows covered only about 4% of the English landscape
by the 13th century and they were the most valuable kind of land” (60).
This meant that there was less manure to fertilize the arable land and
so this agricultural system was beginning to crack.

Wooded lands were also very scarce in England, and “by the end of the
Roman era Britain was well cultivated. By 1086 England was only about
15% wooded, and by 1350 only 10% of the ancient woodland remained”
(61).

The 14th century basically sucked for England, and Donahue compares it
to the convergence of the four apocalyptic horsemen. Between 1315 and
1322 wet weather destroyed harvests resulting in the “Great Famine”.
“In some areas population was already down 30% even before the Black
Death” (p. 66) which arrived in 1348 from the mainland. The plague
killed at least one-third of the remaining population and brought it
down to about 3 million. Growth did not return until the middle of the
16th century, but by 1650 the population was about to reach similar
size as before the 14th century (5m +).

The same thing happened in the 17th century, and the forests and the
meadows suffered at the expense of the cropped land. However, this time
the population could be vented off over to America and so the mixed
husbandry did not strain the land too much. Furthermore, technological
advances in agriculture allowed for greater yield which was further
fueled by an emerging market. This involved rotating crops with clover
and legumes which replenished the soil with nitrogen. This would not
work as well in New England as the soil there was more acidic and there
were no readily available sources of lime that could remedy this.

Chapter
4: The
First
Division and the Common Field System

Donahue begins this section with the creation and frontier myths of the
European
settling of New England: Edward Johnson's Wonder-Working Providence of 1654
which depicts the pioneering Puritans braving an inhospitable land to
found a new settlement; the famous Concord farmers that sparked
the Revolutionary War; and with the "launcher" of the American
ecological movement, Henry Thoreau.

The first settlers did not come into an untamed wilderness, though they
may have considered it so. What they found was a land that had been
supplying
trappers for some years, and also had been terra-formed to a certain
extent by the indigenes that preceded them and who, after decimation by
disease in the twenty years before their arrival, had all but
disappeared from the scene. The colonists task was to adapt their
cultural model of mixed husbandry to the land and climate in which they
found themselves.

The town was laid out near the meadows and abutting fields previously
tilled by the Indians. Many of the settlers came from
open-field/commons communities in England and so structured their
settlement the same way.

The Commons System in Concord

There is no direct record of how land was divided in the First
Division, however, the divisions were recorded in the 1650s-60s in
preparation of the Second Division. Donahue bases his conclusions on
that. The land was divided into:

houselots: 3 to 10 acre lots clustered around the meetinghouse,
training field and mill. These lots typically contained a house, barn,
outbuildings, cowyards and garden. Some may have contained pasture,
meadow and woods, but generally the lots were not meant to be
self-sustaining units.

tillage: though specific areas were owned by specific people, the
tilled fields were generally clustered together and bound by a common
fence

meadows: large lots were even more widely dispersed. In the case
of one farmer, one meadow was three miles from his house. Some smaller
lots were closer to their homes.

commons: these unenclosed lands were used by the inhabitants,
with that use highly regulated, for grazing livestock, cutting wood,
and digging sand, clay and gravel.

Ecological Challenges Facing the
Commons Systems in Concord

The settlers, in trying to transplant a fairly complex communal
husbandry system developed over time in England, to the new
environment of Concord. In so doing they faced two problems: 1)
"finding the right combination of crops and livestock, integrating them
into a working system," and 2) determining if the commons system could
work under these new circumstances (as opposed to individual farms).
(p. 87)

They determined early on that traditional English grains would not do
as well as Indian corn, with the exception of rye. The soil in Concord
was suited to Indian farming with its longer use/fallow cycles, the use
of felled and burned trees for enrichment, and the light texture that
could be worked by hoe. It was less suited to the more intensive and
plow-based English farming, so Concord farmers began fertilizing it,
first with fish, later with dung as their livestock numbers increased.

Folding, the process of allowing livestock, especially sheep, to graze
and fertilize fallow fields, was more difficult in New England. Sheep
were not as easy to raise (climate, soil and predators), the grazing
season was much shorter and so not that much manure would be produced,
and the timing was wrong: folding in England was done prior to sewing
winter wheat when the herd was largest. Folding in New England would
have needed to be done
before sewing corn in the spring. So, manure had to be carted from the
barnyard. Given the wide dispersion of fields, this eventually became
an impractical process.

Another challenge was providing enough hay for fodder for the longer
New England winters. Meadows in Concord were often two wet to mow.
Regulating the water of hay meadows had occurred over generations in
England. Such work, crucial to the colonists farming practice, was also
undertaken in Concord and continued for generations. Again, the land
lots were dispersed to ensure that all farmers had access to hay, even
though they might have to cart it from great distance.

New England had provided food for browsing animals, especially deer,
but was
not rich in grasses that "responded well to constant grazing." (p. 95)
Rainfall patterns were also different from England, with similar total
numbers but a different distribution: more long dry stretches that
resulted in soil ill-suited to traditional English grazing plants.
Settlers could choose between clearing more common land for marginally
good grazing, or, as
they actually did, they could improve their own lots.

Wood was also a challenge: they had plenty but needed more than in
England for fuel (remember those longer winters!). They also, early on,
ran into a conflict between wood
for fuel and necessities which was cut from common land, and wood that
was prized
for selling by individuals for its commercial value (white oak).
Privatizing
woodlots to control who had access to white oak and its profits became
a contentious part of the Second Division process.

The Decline of the Commons in Concord

The 1640/50s in Concord added two additional challenges: exceptionally
cold weather, and Civil War in England that disrupted trade and
diminished immigration. Concord was almost abandoned. "In England, the
common field system had appeared during the Middle Ages when sufficient
population pressure made the tight regulation of field rotations
necessary, to maximize grazing with the expanding arable fields and to
integrate the delivery of manure by the sheepfold." This worked less
well in Concord and so as the second generation came of age they
decided to move to an individual farm system, mostly as a way to
protect the "best lands" for their heirs.

Chapter
5: The
Second
Division

"On January 2, 1653, the householders of Concord assembled in town
meeting and agreed to a sweeping division of the commons" (p. 102)
although they retained rights for communal pasturage on the commons.
The town was divided into thirds with each group made responsible for
its portion (determining how the land would be divided, creating
and maintaining
roads, controlling animals, etc.) The division was communitarian, but
not
egalitarian--people of greater wealth and standing received more land.
Nor was it divided in a grid system. Settlers bargained for diverse
holdings, and so the resulting division is quite complicated. It also
occurred over several generations. (Donahue looks at these divisions in
detail, tracing them through GIS maps based on the records.) Once
common property became personal property it was taxed. Taxes were
needed to pay the General Court (the governmental organization in
Boston), for surveying, clearing titles,
building a meetinghouse and hiring a minister, and roads and bridges.

Land Division Strategies

Land was divided based on two main desires; providing sufficient land
for one's heirs, and providing diverse enough land to support them
without recourse to use of the commons (i.e. they needed tillage,
pasture, meadows, woodlands)

woodlands: the divisions were categorized as pinelot (good for
fuel) and woodlot (valuable harvestable timber). The woodland divisions
show a growing awareness of the kinds of woods available and an
appreciation for how they could be used. Some of the lots were quite
small, indicating a desire to "secure an ample supply of very
particular trees." (p. 115)

meadows: the choicest bits had already been distributed in the
First Division, but some people picked up swamp that was later
converted to meadow

houselots and tillage: "Undoubtedly the driving purpose behind
the Second Division was to provide land for Concord's proprietors to
set up new, more consolidated homesteads outside the village--or to
afford that opportunity to their offspring." (p. 115) (although some of
those offspring had to wait a considerable time for it! Judah Potter -
38 yrs. old. For more on marriage ages and family inheritance
practices, see Philip Greven: "Family Structure in Seventeenth-Century
Life" and John Demos: "Notes on Life in Plymouth Colony")

Persistence of the Commons

Despite the divisions that apportioned them to individual ownership,
the Great Field and the Great Meadow remained in common use, with that
use being strictly regulated. These jointly managed areas were fenced
as two communal units, for two weeks in October to keep grazing
livestock in, but for most of the year to keep animals out. Maintaining
this dense and tall fence required fairly intense labor. Some areas
were vulnerable (and once in, livestock could damage the entire area)
while some areas were inconvenient (roads with gates throughout
the commons). The
area fenced dwindled and the fenced commons was finally dissolved in
1778.

"The transition to private, enclosed farming was more nearly completed
by the 1730s, when Concord had been settled to its borders and almost
all land and livestock had come under individual management as well as
ownership. But this did not mean that farmers even then became
single-mindedly devoted to maximizing individual profits from their
land. Throughout the colonial period, they remained bound one and all
by family and community obligations and expectations and by the
limitations of their environment and their markets into a system that
was oriented primarily toward yielding a comfortable way of life
directly from the diverse elements of Concord's landscape." (p. 127)

Chapter
6:
Settling the
East Quarter

How were lands divided in subsequent generations? While there was
consolidation, distribution among several heirs meant that a balance of
land needed to be passed on. Thus, a blend of tillage, houselot,
pasture, meadow, and woodlot continued to be carved out of available
land. "The result was a pattern of fragmented farms, often knitted
together into complex kin neighborhoods, across the landscape of
Concord. A family trade such as blacksmithing or tanning (also passing
from generation to generation) was often central to the family economic
and social fabric." (p. 135)

In the remainder of the chapter, Donahue follows the land inheritance
of several families through several generations. In some cases those
generations overlapped by quite a few years, the families overlapped by
intermarriage, and the "crazy quilt" division of land become quite
pronounced. As the generations passed some families consolidated land
holdings.
Regardless, Concord was expanding outward as well as filling in as
population increased.

Favorite example: "Like the Meriams, the Brooks family chose not to
partition their land into solid blocks and disperse their houses, but
to keep their homes within sight of one another along a quarter mile of
road and make a hash of their outlands. The exception was Joseph
Brooks. It appears that Joseph had a homelot alongside his brothers
granted him by his father in 1605, but when he finally came to marry in
1704, he decided instead to sell a piece of this to his brother Hugh
and live off by himself. We cannot tell what motivated Joseph Brooks.
We can only notice that, coincidentally or not, things never did seem
to go well for him or his progeny." (p. 147)

Chapter
7: The
Ecological Structure of Colonial Farming

Elements of Husbandry

Tillage

Land use was tightly clustered

preference for growing grain on light, well-drained soils

Convenience of having the bulk of one’s tillage close to the
barn

Overlapping uses (corn, pumpkin, rye, etc.)

Plots were divided between neighbors

Some husbandmen were able to have their land close to the
homestead, while others had to choose between convenience and quality –
and had to travel distances to work their land

Why did they prefer these sandy, droughty soils?

Easy to plow

while lowland meadows were potentially more productive, they
were too wet for tillage.

Upland was too stony

Problems with sandy outwash soils

Too steep

Excessively drained

Not fertile: lose water, and lack in nutrients

Solution was to MANURE the land

First attempt at fertilizing was by using alewives

Problems with alewives: distance from river to land and runs
began to falter in 18th century

Dung from livestock was the answer

Why did yeoman draw the tillage land close to the barn?

In order to easily cart the winter’s accumulation of dung
from the barn, yard, or pen to the land

Some farmers preferred better composted “summer manure,” from
previous year and placed it directly in the hole with the seed.

Some let the livestock dung the ground themselves, rather
than carting it

Tillage pattern

Typical farm had 6 to 12 acres – depending on family needs
and labor

Mid-eighteenth century farmers had more tillable land than
utilized

Tillable land divided into two groups: homelands and outlands

Homelands: close to barn and received most of the manure and
grew most of the Indian corn

Outlands: farther away, less frequently broken up for
tillage; when cultivated it was mainly for rye and rarely manured

Gardens and Orchards

All homesteads had gardens and orchardsb.

They did not appear in tax valuations, but did appear in deeds
and inventories

Work and exchange of gardens belonged to women

Important part of the living of poor people with little or no
land

Orchards stood for the transformation of English husbandry to
New England Farmers

This movement accompanied a shift from beer to cider as workday
drink

Advantages of cider: topographic and temporal

Conserved manure for corn crop (apple trees didn’t require
menuring)

Grew well on rocky slopes

Meadows

Lay at the bottom of husbandry in Concord

Amount of hay = number of cattle that could be kept

Number of Cattle = key to subsistence and wealth (dung for
tillage, tillage for productivity)

Meadows along nearly every stream – had to be converted from
swamps, by digging ditches that dried and served as fences between lots

Used for watering stock, driving mills, accommodating fish,
transporting people and flowing meadows.

Places for watering cattle had to be built

Issues arose between Concord and other towns like: Billerica
because of the construction of dams that ruined Concord’s water flow
and stopped fish from coming upstream(pg. 188)

Chapter
8: A Town
of Limits

Demographic problems

Swelling demand meet fixed resources

Generations upon generations keep building up, and yet the
amount of land available to them does not change

All tillable land is now in use, there are no lands that lay
fallow

Tillage

More acres were being tilled, yet no more grain was being
produced

Meadows were producing less hay, therefore farmers were owning
less cattle, less cattle meant less dung, and less dung meant less
fertilization for tired acidic soil, and less fertilization meant lower
yield for crops that had formerly been productive

Corn is best in neutral soil, rye best in slightly acid soils

Potatoes save the day – they are great in acid soil

Meadows and English Mowing

Several hundred acres of meadow was lost by the secession of
Lincoln

Domesticated English hay was pushed upward by almost equal
equivalent to land lost

Farmers added more cattle, but then hay production was down

Three truths:

first: every acre of meadowland was already being mowed

second: annual cut of hay was declining

third: limits of the meadows had been reached

Jared Eliot proposed remedies: continue draining, and to turn
to cultivated English hay

Pasture

Farmers began enlarging their grazing lands by clearing forest

Clearing forest led to long term difficulties maintaining those
pastures in a productive way

With slash and burn technique, soil stayed positive for a few
decades only – alkaline ash

Soil depletion was bad, and continuous grazing led directly to
a slump in the quality of vegetation

Contrary to the above suggestion that everything was in a rapid
decline: Concord supported minimal commercial production – beef cattle,
cheese, butter and fattened pork

Woodland

Woodland was often not reported in tax valuation

HOWEVER – clearly, there was a lot of it

Cattle and wood were the main cash crops of this pastoral and
woodland economy

Concord was NOT known for its commercial production of these –
farmers practiced a balance of beef fattening and timber cutting

Chapter
9:
Epilogue: Beyond the Meadows

Donahue concludes with a look at the Concord of 1850 that Thoreau would
have seen.
Much of the woodlands have been converted to meadow and pasture, crops
and dairy are now produced for external markets, and the population is
divided between original families and newcomers who would rewrite our
memory of Concord's past. "To this day, we tend to view colonial
agriculture largely through the sharply critical eyes of the
self-confident nineteenth-century improving men who knew it in its
dotage and who wrote its obituary." (p. 222)

By 1850, Concord's land use patterns had changed dramatically. Concord
had the same response to population stresses that their English
ancestors did: "control fertility, emigrate, intensify subsistence
production, or specialize in commercial production." (p. 225) The
population, through limiting family size and emigration, stabilized
between 1780
and 1820. English husbandry continued to be adapted successfully, with
some high-yield, high-nutrition crops becoming more prominent (ex:
beans and potatoes). Higher yield crops also meant less dung was
needed. Cattle (for meat and hides) and wood remained the major "cash
crops."

This changed in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. "Concord
farmers looked mainly to their cattle to find their market specialty:
first beef, then butter and cheese, and, with the coming of the
railroad in 1844, milk. The herd enlarged dramatically, and Concord
became a town of dairy farmers. The increase in commercial production .
. . was made possible partly by farmers' raising of fodder instead of
bread on the tilled land, but mostly by a sharp rise in hay." (p. 228)
Woodlots were sacrificed for haylots as coal became available for fuel
and dimensional lumber was imported for housing. This deforestation had
a damaging
effect on the environment, encouraging flooding and the growth of
useless underbush.

Donahue's conclusion: "Colonial farming was not extensive farming,
moving on constantly to
fresh land as what lay behind was exhausted. On the contrary, it was
intensive farming, in which a great deal of labor was concentrated on
much the same lands, and a workable balance among those lands was
established and carefully maintained. . . The remarkable thing about
colonial Concord is that here, at the very moment when the English
world was setting a capitalist course based on the denial of natural
limits, long generations of new Americans put in place and steadily
improved a workable version of an older mixed-husbandry village culture
and economy, based on an ever-deepening understanding of their local
environment . . . What emerged by the end of the colonial era had all
the makings of a durable agrarian village economy on the ancient
English model, a fundamentally sound agroecosystem." (pp. 230-231)

And the Great Meadow itself? In 1862 the meadow owners lost their
case--that
worsened flooding which ruined hayfields was caused by the Billerica
milldam--when "an august scientific commission appointed by the
legislature to investigate the flowage controversy but dominated by the
mill interests, ruled against them. . . After two centuries at the
heart of Concord's husbandry, the river meadows had scant value in the
new world of commercial farming." (p. 233) But a change in language
had already signaled a change in attitude: the colonials had called the
communal meadows the Great Meadow. By Thoreau's time they were divided,
privately owned, and called the Great Meadows.